>>Well, you know me and I pay for my SuSE distros. All $70 bucks, 8 CDs and 5 manuals of it. Call me a romantic.. call me foolhardy, but, I give a lot of copies of it away too! :-)
>
>Morning Jerry. $70 / 35 people is $2 per distro. Which supports my position.

Hi Evan,

Actually, it supports mine. I could go to the Linuxmall and get a CD of SuSE for $0.27.
Even if all hte distro makers go away, Linux will continue because it can be created from scratch and a new distro maker will do it. I expect to see governments becoming involved in supporting certain distros to make sure their particular version survives. A political thing...

>
>>Contrary to popular FUD, Linux isn't any harder to install or use on a PC than WinXX. In areas where the average WinXX user needs IT support the Linux user more than likely will to.
>
>At best Windows and Linux are the same difficulty to install. Even the Linux gurus know that Linux has a ways to go in terms of ease of use and ease of install.
>
>>However, the fact that most Linux users don't call or pay for tech support is because they don't have to.
>
>Further reducing the chances that someone can make money off Linux. People aren't paying for it, they aren't paying for support.
>
>> Linux doesn't crash very often. I have had only two crashes in the last four years
>
>Same here forWindows 2000 and WinXP.

They haven't been on the market for four years! 8-}
You must be lightly loading your desktop. It seems the crash rates for Win98, Win2K and XP are the same, and they arn't insignificant, if one looks at the higher sampling rates. My own W2K box goes down about 2-5 times per week. It, and the other W2K boxes, drive the IT folks here crazy.
http://www.bugtoaster.com/dw15/Reports/OperatingSystems.asp

It reminds me of the statements folks were making about how stable Win95 was. Then, the clock bug showed up. A bug which guarantees that all Win95 boxes will crash when they reach 49.7 days of operation. It seems the bug escaped detection because few boxes ever stayed up that long, so the bug was hidden in the noise.
JLK